Affiliate links with hash tags
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We are setting up a brand new internal affiliate program for our site. When creating the affiliate URLs I learned that we can use hash tags (#) instead of question marks (?). I remember Rand did a White Board Friday years ago (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash) saying that this was a better way to build affiliate URLs because it basically acts as a stop and/or canonical for the URL. We already have canonical tags but I was thinking of using this in hopes of getting a little extra juice from the affiliate links.
Questions:
- Does Google still treat hash tags the same as they did 3-4 years ago?
- Does anyone see using hash tags as worse than something else, like a question mark?
Thanks!
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I remember that post by Rand too, and using hashtags certainly didn't hurt us.
In the post-penguin era though, I might be a little cautious about those affiliate links because if your program is of any size, you are likely to fairly quickly create an unnatural linking profile with them.
Despite (or because of) our hundreds of thousands of affiliate links, we are making them all nofollow now.
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